Electronic payment giant MasterCard is to focus on scaling up its early commercial mobile payment deployments as the company attempts to encourage its credit card base of almost two billion to adopt mobile money services.
In a new video interview with Mobile World Live, James Anderson, Senior VP – Mobile, at MasterCard, outlines how mobile is going to play a critical role in the future of MasterCard.
“What we’re seeing now is a move from pilots which we’ve done over the years to commercial deployments that we’ve now completed and what we’re really focusing on at Mastercard is scaling,” notes Anderson. “So how do we go from hundreds of thousands, to millions, to billions of consumers having access to mobile payments? The mobile industry talks very proudly about its billions and billions of consumers, but we have 1.9 billion cards in circulation with the MasterCard brand on it. So we as a company and as a network, we also deal in numbers beginning with ‘b’, and I think that really the next challenge is how do we get millions and then billions of consumers using mobile payments?”
Like rival Visa, MasterCard is attempting to steal an early lead in the mobile payments space, having earlier this year launched its own PayPass wallet service. Anderson says the next twelve months will see the company really ramp up investment in mobile money in an attempt to ensure all potential players in the value chain – from banks, to telcos and MasterCard itself – can see commercial success. “[The next year] is probably not the period of time when a lot of flash and new things happen, it’s really around industrialisation and around [launching] platforms that people can adopt en masse,” he predicts.
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